Should you be in the landscaping business?
Maybe you grow the best wisteria on the block, you name your garden tools, and you’re an organized dynamo. Oh, and you have a degree in landscape management.
You’re a natural, right?
Larry Leon has some questions for you that might be eye opening.
When you apply for any management job at Level Green Landscaping, you’ll take a Culture Index personality test.
Check off the adjectives that describe you, then the traits necessary to do your job well, and the results will tell you if the job that interests you is really suited to you.
Why bother? When the right person lands in the right job, everybody wins.
The employee is not only good at their job, but they love it.
That means they’re likely to stay put, which means low turnover for the landscaping company.
And that’s good news for the landscaping company’s customers, who get to work with the same account managers and operations managers over time, developing great, long-term relationships.
“You Can’t Turn an Apple into an Orange”
Leon, Director of Business Development at Level Green, saw amazing results from the Culture Index at the last landscaping company where he worked.
Using the profiles with potential new hires reduced turnover from 40 percent to 20 percent in a year and helped the company surpass sales goals.
“It’s been a remarkable tool,” he says.
The Culture Index is one of a handful of personality profiles used in the business world, including the well-known Myers Briggs test.
“By the time you’re 12 years old your personality is fixed,” Leon says. “It can’t be changed. You can modify your behaviors in limited ways, but you can’t turn an apple into an orange.
“There’s no such thing as a person who has no talent,” he says. “But it helps to have specific traits needed to be happy and successful in a given job.”
Take a business developer, for example.
A good business developer should be an extrovert, take risks, think in the future, have a strong sense of urgency, and not be so detail-oriented that they get bogged down — and slowed down— by details, Leon says.
“You want someone who’s good at having a lot of balls in the air at once, who isn’t so focused on details they can’t move fast enough to always have their pipeline full,” he says.
“You don’t want someone super emotional,” he says. “There’s a lot of rejection in sales. You can’t take it super personally. You have to bounce right back.”
Other jobs in the landscaping industry require other personality traits, he says.
Account managers should be detail focused, he says, because they’re inspecting job sites for quality and are involved in the intricacy of contracts.
It’s not as important for an operations manager to be an extrovert as it is for an accounts manager or business developer, he says.
The Benefits of a Good Match
“None of this means you’re a better or worse human being,” Leon says. “It’s just the way you are. Most people think they can learn any job. They don’t understand the reality of how their personality would or wouldn’t fit a job description.”
Why not match your natural personality traits to a job that needs those attributes, right?
“You want to have someone who not only performs the job well, but who loves their job,” Leon says. “If you don’t love your job, you won’t be fully motivated. You can become a cancer in the body of the company, complaining and spreading unhappiness to other people.”
If you’re that unhappy, you’ll probably leave. Which poses other problems.
“Every time we have to start over hiring a new person, it costs the company a lot of money,” Leon says.
The customer suffers, too, he says.
“They have to keep reinventing the wheel with new people,” he says. “That’s one of the biggest complaints we hear from customers who are unhappy with their landscaping company — that there’s way too much turnover at the account manager level. They feel like they’re spending way too much effort bringing new people up to speed.”
Bringing the Culture Index to Level green fits right in with the company motto, “Do the Right Thing,” Leon says.
“It’s doing the right thing for them as human beings,” he says. “You want happy employees. If you hire people predisposed to fit well, you’re putting a round peg in a round hole, so it fits comfortably. They’ll stick around, they’ll have fun, and you’ll have fun managing them.”
Find the Right Fit at Level Green
Want to join a team that helps make sure you really love it here? Come talk to us.
Do you want to partner with a landscaping company that works hard on our relationship with you?
If you’re not already a Level Green Landscaping client, we’d love to add you to our growing list of happy customers.
Our focus is on commercial properties like offices, mixed-use sites, HOAs, municipalities and institutions in Maryland, Washington DC and parts of Virginia.
Contact us at 202-544-0968. You can also request a free consultation online to meet with us one-on-one.
We’d love to hear from you.
